Cyber Resilience Provides MSPs With A Competitive Edge

Today’s businesses would be hard-pressed to survive and thrive without embracing open standards and tools like email, remote collaboration solutions, and cloud-based SaaS technologies. These have been especially useful to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), allowing even the smallest companies to compete with much larger players and scale to meet global demand. Yet these same technologies have also created more vulnerabilities than ever before.

To reduce the impact of today’s cyberthreats, SMBs — and the managed service providers (MSPs) they depend on — need concrete cyber resilience strategies.

Cyberthreats are more dominant — and dangerous — than ever before

Ransomware may dominate the headlines, but it isn’t the only cyber risk out there. Malware that can shut down operations or cause dangerous critical failures, Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks which can render products and services entirely non-functional or inaccessible, and data breaches that steal confidential information (worth far more than a ransom payout) are just three more types of threats that are becoming increasingly commonplace.

The situation is especially risky for smaller businesses. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, “88% of small business owners felt their business was vulnerable to a cyberattack.” However, these are the same organizations that typically lack an in-house cybersecurity team, a security-focused MSP, or both.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reports 791,790 complaints of cyberattacks in 2020, leading to $13.3B in losses in the U.S. alone. Attacks reported include phishing, extortion, data breaches, and identity theft. There has also been a rise in automation to create more powerful and sophisticated attacks — including credential stuffing, DoS, and exploit kits — allowing anyone to establish their own cybercrime business.

Security has become a significant concern over the last few years due to a few additional factors:

Cyber resilience: How to weather any storm

From smaller organizations having their hard drives wiped and data held for ransom, to major industrial operations having production lines hijacked, helping your clients survive in this threat environment means being able to predict, withstand, and adapt to challenges.

Effective cybersecurity starts with an assumption of breach: you must operate under the notion that however good your protection may be, a data breach is inevitable. Cyber resilience is a measure of your ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from such breaches, as well as other adverse events like natural disasters and equipment failures.

The following strategies will help grow your clients’ resilience, ensuring that you can pivot optimally and assist in recovery from any type of adverse event.

Understand unique client requirements

Sometimes it helps to define “never events” — a term from the world of medicine that refers to events of such severity that they can never be allowed to happen. For example, it’s too easy to promise “zero downtime” without the actual ability or a plan in place to make that happen, and without buy-in from client stakeholders across their entire organization.

That process isn’t simple, but there are a few steps that can make it simpler:

Balance protection and security

To achieve the right balance of protection and security, you’ll need to assess and deploy appropriate tools that prioritize your clients’ business-critical data, systems, and applications:

Adapt to the new normal

Cybercrime isn’t the only thing that’s changed over the last few years. The “new normal” for IT is more complicated than ever, with businesses relying on work-from-home practices, massively distributed workforces, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

This scenario creates a broad range of new potential attack surfaces and methods that traditional security techniques can’t address. A classic virus scanner or firewall, for instance, won’t do much good if the attacked device is outside your client’s local network.

Leverage the cloud

The cloud has been extremely good to SMBs. It offers powerful business applications that scale up or down as they need, saving on capital expenditures and letting them control costs as they grow. But it’s also a source of some of their greatest vulnerabilities.

Most organizations assume SaaS providers will handle security when they migrate their activities to the cloud. This migration makes SMBs’ IT environments more complex, resulting in increased risk to themselves and to their service providers in turn.

Prepare for disaster

No one wants to think about disaster situations. But while both data protection and cybersecurity are essential practices, neither entirely addresses the question of what to do when the worst does happen.

Obviously, your clients hope they will never need you for disaster recovery. But they need to

view these capabilities as their “IT insurance policy” to keep their employees, customers, and reputation safe should disaster strike.

MSPs are rising to meet the unique challenges their clients face. Theoretically, a managed services provider could level the playing field, allowing resource-constrained SMBs to outsource some or all of their IT management and security needs. Unfortunately, there is a gap in the differences between these two services, and not all MSPs are created equal. Many MSPs also offer similar services, making differentiation difficult. 

MSPs who hope to achieve success in the market need to offer a broader range of services and demonstrate their expertise in the critical area of cyber resilience. For more information on how to create a comprehensive cyber resilience program, grab your free copy of Acronis’ e-book, Cyber resilience: Uncovering strategies and technologies.

This guest blog is courtesy of Acronis. Read more Acronis guest blogs here. Regularly contributed guest blogs are part of ChannelE2E’s sponsorship program.